Tom Riddle and Nagini

The heir of Slytherin has a life partner to match: a beautiful witch with a snake hypostasis.

Tom Riddle and Nagini.

💚 Art by: MOONAX

Tom and Nagini on a summer night.

The tulle by the window fluttered, sometimes billowing like a sail, sometimes falling flat and concealing the garden of Slytherin Manor, over which a gray twilight was gathering. Tom, leaning on the windowsill, gazed thoughtfully at the darkening sky. Bare to the waist, he was enjoying the coolness of the late summer evening.

Suddenly, the young Dark Lord’s solitude was interrupted. At that very moment, he felt gentle hands touch his lower back and glide smoothly down to his lower abdomen. A surge of pleasant anticipation shot through him: sharp, sweet, as if promising something more than just a touch. Tom slowly straightened up and turned around.

Nagini was wearing a black, semi-transparent blouse—weightless and flowing. The fabric softly outlined her collarbones, her delicate wrists, and the curves of her body, not revealing but merely hinting at her hidden beauty. When Tom shifted his gaze from the gloomy landscape outside the window to her, the detachment in his eyes melted away, replaced by intense focus.

She moved in close, making no secret of her initiative. Her warm lips touched his neck just below his ear. Tom obediently tilted his head back and froze. His breathing faltered, his eyelids grew heavy, and the world seemed to narrow down to that single moment. Nagini traced her lips lower, toward his collarbone, and lingered there, listening to her beloved’s pulse quicken.

Tom wrapped his arms around her waist. Under his fingers he felt cool fabric, and beneath it, a living, trembling warmth. Nagini lifted her head and looked into his eyes. Deep within his pupils, reflected light trembled, revealing something inhumanly calm and yet insatiable, as if Nagini were awakening something primal. With her fingertips, she traced his cheekbone, traced the line of his jaw, and drew Tom’s face toward hers.

The kiss began gently, almost cautiously, as if they were both afraid of scaring away this fragile feeling. But very soon it grew deeper, more insistent, and Tom responded without a hint of hesitation. The tart taste of her lips made his head spin, blurring the lines between “before” and “after.” He stopped thinking, casting aside all extraneous thoughts to belong entirely to this moment and to Nagini. He simply leaned forward—and Nagini accepted him, pressing her whole body against him, running her fingers through the dark chestnut waves of his hair.

He knew the cold before he knew his own name, having been born on a frosty night in late December.

Since then, the cold had been nesting in the damp walls of the orphanage, in the icy stares of the teachers, in the tin spoon with which Tom ate sticky porridge in the mornings, more like swamp slush. The cold seeped through the cracks in the floor, made its way through the coarse fabric of government sheets, penetrated through the skin, muscles, ribs, and settled weightlessly somewhere behind the sternum.

Tom didn't freeze the way other kids did. When their teeth were chattering and they were huddled against the radiators, Tom didn't even ask for a second blanket.